Funding

The Department of Health and Social Care Reviews Facility has grown out of a previous ‘reviews facility’ in Health Promotion and Public Health; this is the longest-running programme of work in the EPPI-Centre, and has been funded by the Department since 1995.

Scope of the programme

UK decision-makers increasingly demand and use evidence to inform public policy. They need research evidence about the effects (good or bad) and the appropriateness of health, public health and social care interventions. There is a need to draw on diverse types of evidence from across the health and social sciences to address policy questions. This approach requires a national programme of systematic review work to provide the evidence that supports UK policy development and implementation.

The Department of Health and Social Care Reviews Facility not only provides evidence from its own systematic reviews, but also aims to improve the quality of systematic reviews by advancing current and developing new methods. Some of our most well-known contributions have been:

• helping to develop distinctive conceptual frameworks for health promotion and public health reviews;
• developing the 'two-stage' review process by including a 'mapping' stage;
• including 'qualitative' research alongside trials in systematic reviews; and,
• more recently, in testing the applicability of using 'text mining' technologies in systematic reviews.

Bibliographic registers

The Reviews Facility maintains three specialised registers on health promotion and public health, providing a unique source of keyworded trials, systematic reviews and other primary research in this field. These can be accessed from the Databases Page.